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AN ADDEESS 



DELIYEBED AT THE 



CLOSING EXERCISES OE THE TWENTY-NINTH TERM 



INEW YORK STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, 

FEBRUARY 3, 1859. 

BT 

HON. FRANKLIN TUTHILL. 



>- 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 



A L 15 A N Y : 

JAMES CRUIKSHANK, 35 STATE STREET, 

1859 . 



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ADDRESS. 



When friends are leaving for a new country, we go down to the 
pier where the iron" Giant leans resting on his elbows, awaiting the 
signal to force the black hull through stormy seas and mirrory waste 
of waters, to the land of labor and of promise. With merry words, 
and glistening eyes, we squeeze their hands; with swelling hearts 
and husky voices, we cheer when the hawsers are cast off, and, sadly 
remembering how our past care of them fell short, gaily bid them 
" take care of themselves." As the ship glides into the stream, and 
slowly creeps up to the line of the horizon, till at last the whole jost- 
liug crowd of bold and timid, loving and selfish, ambitious and quiet 
arc crushed into one black dot in the blue distance; strange fantasies, 
gloomy doubts and comfortable assurances meet and mix within the 
breasts of those who stay behind. So here, when anotl'er class cast 
oil" the fastening that for years have bound them, and swing out 
into the stream, anxious friends crowd around them to bid good cheer 
to the departing, and strangers can not look on unmoved. What fate 
awaits these new recipients of the diploma? Will they find friends 
in the new homes they seek, and nuggets in the mines they mean to 
work ? or will they eat poisonous herbs, fall among false friends, and 
wrestle with grizzlies on the mountain ? Will they bravely hold 
out amidst storms and oftcuest be wafted by the balmy breath of 
propitious skies ? or will they be shivered on unmapped rocks, pine 
with exhausted stores, lie impotent in the sea's trough ? High iiopes 
and unwhispcred fears, stop on shore at every ship's departure, and 
liopes no less exalted, fears no Ic^s carefnll}' concealed, tarry with 
these teachers and these friends, when each new graduate leaves this 



4 ADDRESS. 

school to face the world, for which this was the threshold and port of 
preparation. 

Indeed, no doubt most of the anxiety is on the part of those who 
are left behind. You who are going-, are rid henceforth, for a time 
at least, from the irksomeness of set duties. While you suffer some 
sharp pangs at the sundering of friendly ties, you can not deny that 
your spirits rise — the ballast that so long weighed them down, to-day 
being tumbled over the side. True there is some tremor — Leander 
felt some as he plunged into the Hellespont, though the languishing 
Hero was on the farther side. You are at the door of a new world, 
your hand is on the knocker, and how should you know whether 
Beauty or the Beast will open it ? You are about to lead off a solo — 
unattended for a while at least, before a gaping auditory; whether 
the first note will be the one you essay, or its sadly flattened fel- 
low, you can only guess. Teaching school, after all, is very much 
like discovering Continents, somewhat easier after the first success 
ful effort. 

But take courage, friends; the business you engage in stands well 
with the world ; it is a most honorable one, and about as remune- 
rative as any of the professions. Your work is certainly a most im- 
portant one, equal to most in the firmness of its impression upon 
the passing hour — yielding to none in its power to shape the future 
history of the world. You go down to meet the up-coming genera- 
tion; to take it by the hand and lead it to the upland of quiet useful- 
ness, or the perilous bights of fame. Like Sandy Hook pilots, you 
go far down to sea, hail and board the arriving fleet of patriots, 
poets, men of mark, and pilot them through " the Swash," or " the 
main channel " clear of shoals, past quicksands, up to their port. 
Upon your faithfulness and skill, perhaps more than upon any one 
other element of molding power, it depends whether the people of the 
Empire State in 1880, shall be the intelligent, powerful, hearty race 
of men which the spirit and genius of the times has pledged that 
they shall be. Indeed the dullest mind can not dwell for a moment 
upon the nature of the teacher's errand without an overwhelming 
sense of its importance. 

But to expatiate upon this theme was no part of my intention to-day. 
I came simply, at the bidding of those who have your interest at 
heart, and the pledge of my poor services ever, to charge you seri- 
ously, that you touch with no bungling hand the dainty mechanisms 



ADDRESS. 5 

that the people will entrust to you in your new calling; and to con- 
g^ratulate you tliat the field you enter on is broken up, ploughed and 
harrowed; that in other words, a new era has opened on the schools. 
The date of that epoch we can fix to a day. It was that day in each 
district when the teacher discovered and the people confessed that 
the true ofiice of the teacher was not to instruct hut to educate children. 
The just appreciation of the diff'erence between education and instruc- 
tion was the high wall of separation — the barrier firm and solid, 
between the old style of schools and the new. The account current 
with Popular Ignorance was closed, and anew leaf turned over, when 
the great fact fairly dawned upon the teacher that it was none of his 
business to tumble facts into the child's mind, as if it were a sunken 
lot to be filled up, nor even to pile up facts in orderly array in it. 
The child's mind is not a mail bag to be stufi'ed with a certain quan- 
tity of letters, news, knowledge of one sort or another, locked, label- 
ed and despatched on its route through life; it is rather to be treat- 
ed as a living, growing power or combination of powers — of imagin- 
ation to be fed on what imagination craves; memory to be grown 
and strengthened on Mr. Gradgrind's facts; judgment cultivated by 
opportunities to select the right out of the indifferent and the wrong; 
tlie reasoning faculty to be developed by exploring the relations that 
exist between cause and effect; and all of this intellectual feed to be 
administered through the medium of the child's interest. And in 
every living thing, every objective topic of thought, tlie child is inte- 
rested. Its curiosit}' would explore every secret of nature, but it is 
smitten down by the surrounding ignorance, perpetually rebuffed by 
tlie stupidity of those who should be its instructors. True, there are 
many things to be learned — to be committed to memory for which 
we have no taste (though they may have) — that immense budget of 
facts comprised in the multiplication table, and that oth(n- world of 
facts in the spelling of words. The task of remembering these, which 
we should make such hard work of, seems trivial to them. Happilv, 
childhood is capable of accomplishing very much, from which man- 
liood shrinks away, distrustful of its power. But memory, infantile or 
manly, seems to be constituted as the crab is — disposed to hold fast 
that at which we are constantly plucking, but relaxing its grasp upon 
what we surrender. The thousand dry facts that constitute ortho- 
graphy, and the multiplication table, there is no day in the year, nor 
year in our lives, that we have not occasion to pluck at, and hence 
memory holds them with unflinching tenacity. The (<rror of the old 
school-master was in cramming into the memory, ten thousand other 



6 ADDEESS. 

things, severally important enough, but for which there was to be 
no daily use, with the hope that they would lie quiet and in time be 
digested — as if memory were some ruminating animal that browsed 
through the school-days, and then lay down like cows to chew the 
cud. But we forget our Catechism, if not called upon to teach it; we 
should forget our Lord's Prayer, if happily He had not set thorns 
along our road to wound us every day, that remembering its balm, 
we may use it, or given us little ones who at our lips require to learn 
the charm. We forget our rules of grammar, the whole tedious cata- 
logue of poly-syllables that by courtesy we continue to call geo- 
graphy — we forget all except those little scraps of rhyme which de- 
lighted us with their jingling, and so entered into our being, with such 
associations of pleasure that neither Time can filch, nor Business 
wrench them out of our possession. 

Perhaps we find in nothing so much as in the matter of Grammar, 
the old style of stuffing continued where there ought to be teaching. 
Grammar, if I rightly remember the time-honored definition, "teaches 
the art of speaking and writing the language correctly." But the 
Grammar that I studied taught no such thing. The intricacies of 
that noble, most essential art, come not of Grammar, but of teachers. 
Grammar is the philosophical explanation of phenomena occurring in 
the language of polite and polished society. It is for those who 
already speak and write almost correctly, and its formulae of rules are 
absolutely necessary as caskets for our weak memories to preserve 
principles and the aggregates of information in. They furnish the 
gauges by which we justify our practice and correct provincialisms. 
But teaching the philosophy of art does not teach the art itself. Else 
why do we perpetually hear men who are quite familiar with the 
rules, stumbling among the tenses, persons and numbers, like blind 
men among the tombs ? The children of educated parents, on the 
other band, who from infancy have heard language correctly used, 
seldom blunder, after that age when it is "cunning" to govern verbs 
singular by objectives plural. ISow, there is no one thing which it 
will be your duty to teach so thoroughly and faithfully as the art of 
using language right and well, and not to your Grammar class only, 
but to all who come under your roof — to the blacksmith's poor-house 
apprentice who turns in " for a month's schooling " in winter, and to 
the frocked boy who is not yet past " B-a-k-e-r " in his Orthography. 
And you can do still more by stealth than formally. Ask that chubby 
youth who is always so hot after the ball at recess, how the game 



ADDRESS. 7 

went on, how bis last skating- match went ofT, how lie f^ot through 
with his last holiday, and when he has learned to confide in yon, he 
will reel oil" the story with no lack of words. But as he warms to 
the rehearsal, you see at a glance, in what department of Grammar 
he is deficient. Kindly correct his errors, but not too many at a time 
lest you discourage him. Follow it up, howevcir, and be can not fail 
to improve rapidly. "When he has become interested in correcting bis 
own errors, if old enough to comprehend abstractions, he will turn to 
Grammar with relish; and now not one teacher only, but he has a 
liundrcd teaching him Grammar. The pluugluiKiii geeing and hawing 
his o.xen, the schoolmate relicarsing his last adventure, his father 
rebuking his heedlessness, are all furnishing either models of cor- 
rectness that delight him, or specimens of false Grammar that his 
swift thoughts are correcting in the midst of the stor}', the rebuke, 
the commendation. Does the food of the feeder digest any better, 
for his knowledge of tlie comparative solubilities of the various arti- 
cles of food ? But when one's digestion is good, it is a matter of 
pleasant curiosity to know how much longer beef than venison must 
lie quarantined, before their several virtues may become part and 
parcel of the human machine. So, to know the philosophy of lan- 
guage and its construction is pleasant, but to construct it well, which 
is not dependent on the philosophy of the thing, is essential. 

In the method of teaching Geography too, there is left a great deal 
of the leaven of the old school fermenting. It is yet too much a dry mat- 
ter of Mesopotamias, Michilimackinacks, Seringapatams and the like. 
The child peeping into a book of Geography, seeing the pictures of 
lions in Africa, of elephants in India, of rafts on Western rivers, is 
sure that he will come up to this delightful study as to the reading of 
a fairy tale. Shame on our teachers that he is so often doomed to dis- 
appointment; that what he anticipated as a delicious collection of 
travelers' tales, he finds a dismal desert of boundaries that shift with 
the whims of autocrats, and the schemes of politicians — of capitals 
that can not possibly retain their position while he is fixing them in 
memory — of latitudes and longitudes which to all tlie world e.xcept 
sailors and employees on the Coast Survey convey no more definite 
impression than uninterpreted Syriac. There is not in all the world 
of humanit}' a child that docs not love stories, but Geography i.s a 
traveler's story, and teachers have no excuse for dispelling the charm, 
or apology for shedding dullness on the theme. The hour of recita- 
tion in Geography may be made, and ought to be, the season for 



8 ADDEESS. 

encouraging the curiosity, gratifying the inquisitiveness, and excit- 
ing the interest of the pupil. 

History as taught even yet is too much a mere thread to string 
dry dates on. Compilers dissect away all that goes to make her 
rounded, shapely form of beauty, and pointing to the rattling skele- 
ton of bones and shriveled ligaments, ask us to fall in love with his- 
tory. Is it not a shame that the exciting history of our own state's 
growth, every chapter of which has the charm of a romance, from the 
beginning when the wise men from Communipaw sallied forth to 
explore the marvels of Hell Gate, and under the cloud that the great 
Van Twiller raised, founded New Amsterdam, down till the present 
when the enlarged canals are almost completed, and the Empire 
State numbers within its boundaries three and a half millions of peo- 
ple, and one starting from its easternmost limits exhausts almost a 
day and a night in reaching the western line, though he rush through 
at a most rapid rate of steam, but never in all his flight passes out 
of the circle of some common school district or some well marked 
church's influence or the close vicinity of some happy homestead — 
is it not a shame that the stirring story of all this growth should be 
construed and corrupted into a disgusting "muddle" of dates of 
city foundations, of Indian wars, and of the beginnings and endings of 
gubernatorial terms ? It is a wonder that the Muse of History has 
not long ago torn up her tablets in disgust at the stupidities that are 
perpetrated in her name. 

The great mistake left over from the old, in the new era, is in sup- 
posing that a child goes to school to learn facts. That were utterly 
unnecessary. The facts of the world lie patent — scattered up and 
down it everywhere ; moreover they are all soluble and ready for inges- 
tion. The great object of the school and of the teacher should be to 
interest the scholar. Interest him in the structure of language and 
everywhere, anywhere, at home, abroad, by the way, wherever there is 
a book or a human voice he finds a teacher in Grammar. Interest him 
in Geography, and the mute book, the daily pot pourri that we call 
newspaper, the rough whaleman rolling up the street, the unwashed 
immigrant just landed, are all teachers of Geography. In his com- 
panion just returned from a cruise to China, in his toothless, wrinkled 
old nurse born in Ireland, in the white-headed negro stolen on the 
Guinea coast half a century ago, he finds Strabos, Humboldts, Malte 
Bruns and Morses. Interest him in Geology, and the pebble he hurls 



ADDRESS. 9 

with his slin^, the boulder interruptiug the carriage-way, the outcrop- 
ping- strata of rocks that make the mountains, the impalpable dust 
teach liiai Geology and preach Theology at every step he takes by day- 
light. Interest him iu Natural Science, and every weed and flower 
utters entertainment for him, every dead and living thing solicits to 
study and nourishes his intellectual growth. Educate the senses of the 
little ones whom you are entrusted to lead up to maturity. Educate 
the eye to see something beside the text in books. It needs no costly 
apparatus, no high-priced lenses, no outlay for microscopes, to bring 
before their vision ten thousand marvels in the minutiaj of nature's 
works, that will stir the blood of the most sluggish ; and wlien you 
liave once interested them, you can easily turn them in any direction 
you desire. God meant our children to be naturalists. He endow- 
ed them with the love of nature and gave them the senses to perceive 
her relations and appreciate her cunning methods. How the eye of 
infancy opens and sparkles as you tell the traits of animals and the 
habits of plants! The child omits his dinner to see where the blind 
mole's burrow runs, to watch the movements of the minnow in the 
creek, to follow the hermit crab along the beach, to listen the different 
whistles of birds, to see how the spider comes out of his contest 
with the blue-bottle, to note which way the worm is squirming, to 
see what the hairy caterpillar creeps up the grape-vine for. All his 
instincts go out after nature, and when he enters school he fancies 
they are to be encouraged/and gratified, it is a shame that his school 
days should so restrain his early loves and teach him that books are 
the only things worth studying. 

Our future is full of promise through the influence of our improved 
order of teachers. Our Free School system spreads its blessings 
over every acre of our soil. It tenders, free as air or water, an edu- 
cation to every child. The generation of teachers who "boarded 
'round," and asked five dollars a month is rapidly dying out. And 
now there is no county, no town so remote that some school in it has 
not been made a model through the services of this Normal School. 
Iu the earnest workmen that leave these halls to-day, eager for the 
task of teaching, not words, but things, intending to use books to 
assist them, not to cram children from, to educate rather than to in- 
struct, we have ample pledges that a good w(jrk will he wrought. 
And the public sentiment is pretty well prepared to appreciate your 
intelligent efforts. The ancient obstacles to the .sensible teacher's 
progress are mostly removed, but perhaps the very one that will most 



10 ADDRESS. 

annoy you has been omitted from yonr anticipations. Within a few 
years past there have grown np, especially in the cities, examining 
boards, some of whose members have compassed the whole circle of 
the sciences, in their own estimation, inasmuch as they have swallowed 
whole the smallest text-books that feebly and dully treat of them. 
Seating yourself before one of these Solomons in the expectation of 
discovering to him, by your prompt answers to pertinent queries your 
perfect preparation, you shall find yourself overwhelmed with such 
questions as, "What was the date of the commencement of King Phil- 
ip's war?" "What is the latitute and longitude of Boorhampoor?" " The 
Hoang Ho, on what parallel does it rise, which way run and what its 
comparative length with the Kiang Ki ?" If these, and other equally 
frivolous questions are promptly answered in the very language of 
the Geography that the examiner swallowed, you shall receive a cer- 
tificate of grade A. But if not — as of course you can not, since it is 
not your custom to carry such baggage in the engine-room, deeming 
it all suiEcient if such truck is stuffed away in the baggage car, 
while you carry the check that admits you to overhaul it whenever 
necessai^y^-do not for a moment suppose that you can obtain a first 
grade certificate, no matter what stores of useful knowledge you have 
at command, what tact at teaching, skill in interesting, power in 
governing without seeming to. And in your schools the same thing 
will annoy you; to see the scholar who nearest approaches the parrot, 
graded by the superficial examiner above her who in simple earnest- 
ness and in their spirit accomplishes the tasks you set. These Solomons 
in self-conceit are especially distrustful of college-bred men in the 
Common Schools. And there is a grain of truth in their assumption, 
that men fresh from their classics and full of nothing but what is dead 
in language, abstruse in reasoning and refined in science, do not gird 
themselves as easily and naturally to the task of teaching element- 
ary principles as even those who are masters only of those princi- 
ples. But as the greater includes the less, it must be true that the 
best educated man is best fitted to teach after he has once brought 
his mind to the business before him. Fortunately for your peace and 
for popular education, it is only in rare localities that these Sir Ora- 
cles of Ignorance preside over the examining boards; but where they 
do, if Daboll himself should re-appear and humbly sue for a certifi- 
cate he would find it a tough task to pass in Arithmetic, and Hum- 
boldt would stumble dreadfully in Geography. 

But the brightest prophecy of hope in your career is gathered from 



ADDRESS. 11 

a glance at the past history of the schools — at the schools as they 
were twenty years ago. Children in those old times must have 
learned more iudiroctly than directly. Detained six hours of each 
day, reading, writing and doing nothing, there daily was created a 
vacuum within their brains, so that when let loose, intelligence rushed 
in to fill it, from contact with the intelligent world outside. Mean- 
while, it must be confessed that in school they learned to obey, to 
herd peacefully with their fellows, to give and take, to appreciate 
themselves according to their merits, being prompted thereto by the 
polishings-off of older and stouter boys, to " make their manners " to 
strangers, and to be courteous after a rough and Puritanic fashion. 
They learned the multiplication table too, and how to carry one, to 
spell, to point the feather end of tlie quill over the right shoulder, and 
so, through much tribulation, our fathers, as the phrase went, "got 
their learning." No picture of the old school-master so vividly re- 
produces him, as wlien he is drawn with the birch under his left arm, 
the pen's nib resting flat on the left thumb nail, and the keen edge of 
the pen-knife just about to amputate it on the line of the nail's diago- 
nal. What, with setting copies, ruling copy-books along the edge of 
that hickory ruler which did double duty — we remember with a shud- 
der its other and more frequent application — lining off by virtue of 
that leaden plummet (which, with an art wc deemed almost divine, he 
had cast, over night), the boundary below which the as and the bs 
must not dip, nor the qs and the ^s far lift their heads — between 
these pedagogic employments and the endless whittling of quills, one 
almost wonders now how he got time to castigate our good grand- 
mothers as they deserved, and to instill the multiplication table and 
manners into the rampant young dare-devils that grew up our grave 
grandsires. And when we remember the rough pine board shelves that 
we courteously called desks, through which so many busy jack-knives 
and knot-holes let daylight play, on which lay the solitary sheet of 
foolscap, our only writing-book, the rickety pens always just mended 
and always needing more mending, the little earthen inkstand, cram- 
med with its wad of cotton dampened with pale ink, the marvel 
grows how our fathers escaped the necessity, when they made their 
wills, of signing their names with an X. I am ncit despising the old 
school-house. Having graduated out of it, be sure I shall ahviiys 
speak with tenderness of its memories. 

The dear old hulk rises before my imagination now; its exterior 
time-stained and very modest, its roof mossy, its sides "pierced with 



12 ADDEESS. 

eight windows and a thousand holes," each broad-side and the doors 
covered with elaborate carving of sloops and trees and men, we 
called them, but our elders said they were pictures of benches set on 
end; its corners — for economy spurned the luxury of continuous un' 
derpinning — propped on unhewn boulders; and beneath it all was the 
sacred depository of sleds and ball-sticks, kites and hoops in their 
season, each boy's in his undisputed place. I see now its unplastered, 
unceiled interior, the rafters concealed by a floor, over which at noon- 
spell the brave, big boys groped, scaring out the mice and throwing 
the wasps' nests down on the heads of the frightened girls; its benches 
backless, made of pine slabs, out of which the pitch kept frying in 
hot days, supported by legs of cord-wood so carelessly protruding 
above as sadly to increase rents and necessitate patches. How the little 
box-stove glowed with heat in the centre of the room, and the centre 
too, of a row of ruddy urchins not yet promoted to the high seats, 
when the fire was fairly started and it had done smoking! how the 
wind whistled through the cracks and crannies and the rattling win- 
dow sash, and abundantly insured that ventilation which, as fur- 
nished by the appliances of pulleys, cords and registers, and the , 
infinitely puff"ed Dr. Reids of Edinboro', we dry up now-a-days as 
modern improvements. I should be ashamed to forget the wholesome 
"course " of the old school, its one long class in the English Reader, 
where all who could pass muster in the dissyllables of the spelling book 
were entitled to stand in ragged array and in all the attitudes of inge- 
nious laziness, and read by the hour in turn. Dr. Blair's enchanting 
sermons on the beauties of virtue, and the side-shaking stories from 
the Spectator; or the cyphering over the thumbed Daboll, our pale 
students being artistically classed into those who could carry one and 
those who could not, or the scholarly devotion to our granite slates 
on which we played pins, and with heads bent low, told how the 
master could do the rule of three as easily as he could add, and, on 
a pinch, with the book before him, even extract the square root; or 
for a moment forget the filling joy of that hour of Saturday, an- 
nounced by the noon-mark on the floor in sunny days, or the sound of 
the conch-shell summoning the farmers to their dinner, when the master 
pronounced that unvarying benediction, " school's dismissed — go 
directly home," and with a bound and a hurrah we leaped into the 
open air, and were free to tease the old folks at home and pick up 
chips for the day's remainder. The old school had its virtues cer- 
tainly. It kept us out of mischief at home for six hours of the day. 



ADDRESS. 13 

and gave our parents time to consider what they should set us at 
when ohlor; but wedded as I am to all that is conservative, I can not 
honestly confess that I wish it back again. 

And it never will reappear. The people once having tasted the 
fruits of free popular education, never will re-instate the ancient 
style of school. The system unfolded never can be crushed back into 
what it grew from. You can not with all your skill and power fold 
back the full-blown rose into the bud. You can not crowd back the 
chicken into the shell, 

}Sj friends, when I remember how fast in all matters pertaining to 
education the world is progressing, and how little I know of that pro- 
gress in its later marches, I am astounded at my own presumption in 
addressing you. Perhaps, however, by my ignorance, you have been 
able, calculating the parallax as it were, to discover the rapidity of 
your advances. The men that crowd the decks of a man-of-war when 
all sails are set to a light breeze, little know what headway they are 
making, till they see how some lone rower in his skiff, with sleeves 
rolled up, tugs and sweats and falls astern, trying to overtake and 
board her. Upon such a subject a modest man might well shrink 
from addressing such an audience — a house full of critics, whose eyes 
are professionally sharp at seeing flaws in sentences, on whose ears 
a mis-pronounced word rings the knell of a speaker's reputation, 
'who, like good Samaritans, pause wherever any poor Jew of a noun 
has fallen among thievish other nouns that rob it of its agreeing 
verb, who will not fail to observe any widowed verb mourning in 
weeds its lost nominative, who are sure to be moved over any or- 
phaned adjective left to struggle through a cold dry sentence with- 
out a substantive to lean on. Perhaps too, I ought* to apologize still 
farther as I am in that order of business, for addressing teachers 
without speaking of their responsibilities; but in this it is a consola- 
tion to know that never a superintendent, trustee, inspector, exa- 
miner or interested friend visiting your school will yield to your 
urgent request for a brief speech, without speaking eloquently of your 
responsibilities. If I have come short in this respect, it was not because 
I was not awake to them; but I knew that where they had occurred 
to me once, the sense of them had pressed heavily a hundred times on 
you — that where their shadow had once rested on my mind, you had 
wearily borne their burden by the hour, by the day, by the year. 



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